_Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems_, _The Father of the Forest and
Other Poems_, _Lachrymae Musarum_, and the series of sonnets upon
Armenia, called _The Purple East_. There is in Watson nothing of the
dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is
also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever
he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual
rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His
poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take,
as an example, his poem upon the _Father of the Forest_. A yew tree,
which may be fifteen centuries old, is addressed by him; and, musing on
the historical scenes it must have lived through, he gives us a series
of verses which touch musically upon salient epochs and characteristic
figures in the history of England. To this the yew practically replies
that the so-called historical events amount to nothing, and that "wars
and tears" will repeat themselves, until men are some day civilized into
pursuing but one object, which shall be Beauty. The piece itself reveals
nothing profound, awakes no particular emotion. Given the first idea of
the plot, so to speak--an idea which is not far to seek for any
reflective man--the rest of the material follows as a matter of course.
But where is the man besides Mr. Watson who will give us such lines as--
The South shall bless, the East shall blight,
The red rose of the Dawn shall blow;
The million-lilied stream of night,
Wide in ethereal meadows flow.
I do not say that the poet is without his measure of feeling; but it is
rather the pensive feeling of a Jaques, the dainty interest of a Matthew
Arnold, than any surge of emotion. The poet seems to me to encourage his
brain to feel--to give it that passing luxury with a certain amount of
deliberation.
The _Hymn to the Sea_ is the only real poem written in the English
language in hexameters and pentameters. There have been many attempts at
these metres, but they have been failures, one and all. And nothing
shows Mr. Watson's skill, nay genius, more than the fact that his
attempt is a great and conspicuous success. The sea, confined within its
shores, never resting, yet never able to pass its bounds, at war with
the winds, and serving the moon with its tides, is compared to man, with
his unrest, his limitations, his aspirations. As before, when the clue
is once given, the thread is easily followed to the end. The result is
simply an intellectual operation done into verbal music. Yet who but
William Watson, having to speak of the moon as mistress of the sea,
could express his fancy in words like these:--
When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,
Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.
Ah, she comes, she arises--impassive, emotionless, bloodless,
Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.
Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:
Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!
Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,
She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,--
Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,
All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.
Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought
were less of a thought than it is.
_Autumn_, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season.
What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the passing and
perishing of all things that are. True; but to express those
suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a
rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their
possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty.
There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less passionate,
less full of thought, than the _Ode to the West Wind_, but we could ill
afford to spare such combinations of sound as--
Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne
From undiscoverable lips, that blow
An immaterial horn.
In _Liberty Rejected_ we meet once more with the similitude of the moon
and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is,
like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the
comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses
himself thus--
The ocean would as soon
Entreat the moon
Unsay the magic verse
That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon.
When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting
himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us
revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as
before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood
of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain--
In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll;
Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:
Then journeyed home to carry in his soul
The torment of the difference till he die.
Why should I go on to quote such lines as--
That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,
or,
Curls the labyrinthine sea
Duteous to the lunar will.
Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase,
and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from
Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most
delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains
with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing
through Keats to Wordsworth, he says--
In my young days of fervid poesy
He drew me to him with his strange far light,--
He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,
And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself
Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.
Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice
Murmuring of dethroned divinities
And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn--
And Philomela's long-descended pain
Flooding the night--and maidens of romance
To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come--
Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse
And thraldom, lapping me in high content,
Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.
And then a third voice, long unheeded--held
Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found
me at last with ears to hear. It sang
Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys,
Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,
And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;
And from the homely matter nigh at hand,
Ascending and dilating, it disclosed
Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths
Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass
With roots that groped about eternity,
And in each drop of dew upon each blade
The mirror of the inseparable All.
It is also clear from such reminiscences as--
The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,
which is practically Tennyson, or
The maker of this verse, which shall endure
By splendour of its theme, that cannot die,
which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or--
And ghostly as remembered mirth,
which is largely Tennyson again.
I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and
retentive reading.
William Watson has thus formed a style which is almost perfect. I say
"almost," not quite. There are some few mannerisms which we might wish
away. He speaks of "greatly inert," "greatly lost in thee," "greatly
slain," "doomed splendidly to die," "loudly weak," "immutably prevail,"
and "vainly great," till we are forced to recognize what looks very
much like a trick. He has occasional moments of tautology, which may
possibly be deliberate, but is none the better for that, as when he
says:--
Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strews
The facile largess of a stintless muse.
And
The retrospect in Time's reverted eyes.
And worst of all--
"Fair clouds of gulls that _wheel_ and _swerve_
In unanimity divine,
With _undulation serpentine_,
And wondrous consentaneous _curve_."
He sometimes falls into lines which ring of the mint of Pope--
No guile may capture and no force surprise.
Or--
Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn.
Or--
Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.
In one passage only do I find him falling, falling, falling into the
flattest style of the _Excursion_:--
"I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate
To her companions how a favouring chance
By some few shillings weekly had increased
The earnings of her household."
But as I read this, I murmur to myself those lines from Wordsworth--
"And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property,"
and wonder how it is that such aberrations can befal even the very man
who seems most determined to avoid them.
Watson's second endowment is still one of taste and intellect. It is the
gift of literary criticism. The special charm of the great poets is so
subtly apprehended by him, and so exquisitely expressed, that it will be
a source of much surprise if many of his concise verdicts do not become
the household words of students of literature. Let me quote a passage
from his poem on _Wordsworth's Grave_:--
You who have loved, like me, his simple themes,
Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,
And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams
Are lovelier for his strain.
It may be that his manly chant, beside
More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be, thought has broadened, since he died,
Upon the century's noon;
It may be that we can no longer share
The faith which from his fathers he received;
It may be that our doom is to despair
Where he with joy believed;--
Enough that there is none since risen who sings
A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things
Which is our source and goal;
And though at touch of later hands there float
More artful tones than from his lyre he drew,
Ages may pass e'er trills another note
So sweet, so great, so true.
Take again--
Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine;
Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view;
Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;
Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.
And these:--
Shelley, the hectic flamelight rose of verse,
All colour and all odour and all bloom.
And on Burns--
But as, when thunder crashes nigh,
All darkness opes one flaming eye,
And the world leaps against the sky,
So fiery clear
Did the old truths that we pass by
To him appear.
These, then, are the prominent poetical virtues of William Watson,
virtues which none can avoid observing--his magnificent power of
expression and his literary acumen. He is an intellectual poet, and
therefore not devoid of substance. Yet his substance alone would never
make him a _vates_. I can imagine that in prose criticisms and in satire
he would make a distinguished figure. Here is his answer to Mr. Alfred
Austin when the laureate advised him to be patient with the Armenian
question:--
"The poet laureate assured me--first, that whosoever in any
circumstances arraigns this country for anything that she may do or
leave undone thereby covers himself with shame; secondly, that although
the continued torture, rape, and massacre of a Christian people, under
the eyes of a Christian continent, may be a lamentable thing, it is best
to be patient, seeing that the patience of God Himself can never be
exhausted; and, thirdly, that if I were but with him in his pretty
country house, were but comfortably seated 'by the yule log's blaze,'
and joining with him in seasonable conviviality, the enigmas of
Providence and the whole mystery of things would presently become
transparent to me, and more especially after 'drinking to England' I
should be enabled to understand that 'she bides her hour behind the
bastioned brine.'"
It would be hard to better that.
But though I call him intellectual, and more artistic than inspired, I
have no wish to underrate the intrinsic poetry in such lines as these,
on the _Great Misgiving_:--
Ah, but the apparition--the dumb sign--
The beckoning finger bidding me forego
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!
And, ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,
And while the purple joy is passed about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit
Or homeless night without.
Nor the graceful fancy in these, from _Beauty's Metempsychosis_:--
From wave and star and flower,
Some effluence rare
Was lent thee; a divine but transient dower;
Thou yield'st it back from eyes and lips and hair
To wave and star and flower.
Should'st thou to-morrow die,
Thou still shalt be
Found in the rose, and met in all the sky;
And from the ocean's heart shalt sing to me,
Should'st thou to-morrow die.
I have also said that Mr. Watson knows his own strength and his
limitations. Let me conclude by quoting a passage from his _Apologia_,
the very style of which will be in itself the justification of the man
whom it argues to justify:--
... Because I have full oft
In singers' selves found me a theme of song,
Holding these also to be very part
Of Nature's greatness....
* * * * *
And though I be to these but as a knoll
About the feet of the high mountains, scarce
Remarked at all, save when a valley cloud
Holds the high mountains hidden, and the knoll
Against the clouds shows briefly eminent;
Yet, ev'n as they, I, too, with constant heart,
And with no light or careless ministry,
Have served what seemed the voice; and unprofane
Have dedicated to melodious ends
All of myself that least ignoble was.
For though of faulty and of erring walk,
I have not suffered aught in me of frail
To blur my song; I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness for a gift.
And unto such as think all Art is cold,
All music unimpassioned, if it breathe
An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow
With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast,
Be it enough to say, that in Man's life
Is room for great emotions unbegot
Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot
Even of the purer nuptials of the soul;
And one not pale of blood, to human touch
Not tardily responsive, yet may know
A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality,
When, rapt from all relation with his kind,
All temporal and immediate circumstance,
In silence, in the visionary mood
That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives
Order beyond this coil and errancy;
Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone,
And hears the eternal movement, and beholds
Above him and around and at his feet,
In million-billowed consentaneousness,
The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world.
The
Making of a Shakespeare
There is nothing both wholly new and wholly true to be said concerning
Shakespeare. Eckermann, who played Boswell to Goethe's Johnson, was once
disposed to discuss Shakespeare with that great master. Alone of modern
poets Goethe has revealed a capacity in some degree comparable with that
of the myriad-minded Englishman. Yet Goethe replied to Eckermann, "We
cannot talk about Shakespeare; everything is inadequate." If the German
intellectual colossus, whose conversation bestrode the narrow world from
comparative anatomy and scientific optics to the principles of art,
could not talk of Shakespeare; if a poet whose writings, next to those
of our own unrivalled bard, are most thickly studded with great stars of
thought, could not talk of Shakespeare, what is to be said by us punier
men who are compelled to peep about for matter of discourse? "Everything
is inadequate." That perhaps is the reason why talk about Shakespeare,
even from the sanest of men, is apt to convert itself into perfervid
rhapsody. Meanwhile, from those whose sanity is less assured, it runs to
the delirium of some harebrained cipher of Shakespeare-Geheimnis, and an
amused world is asked to listen while some female Dogberry asserts that
the truth, too long concealed, has been proved, and it will soon go near
to be thought, that _Romeo and Juliet_ was written by none other than
Anne Hathaway.
I do not come before you to-night with either a rhapsody or a
mare's-nest. Nor do I come with criticism of that marvellous creator,
who, to use the bold expression of the Frenchman, _apres Dieu crea le
plus_. When, with the progress of the years, a supreme writer is read
more and more over all the world; when his plays are translated from
English into Hebrew and Japanese, and performed in Roumanian and
Hindustani, criticism should become simply a humble endeavour to realize
the various powers and beauties which constitute such triumphant
greatness.
That is my attitude to-night. To me Shakespeare--though not flawless,
because human--is the crown and consummation of literature. Ardently and
reverently as I admire Homer, AEschylus, Dante and Goethe, my mind places
even these on somewhat lower seats than the creator of _Hamlet_ and
_Othello_. My object is to review--however imperfectly--what went to his
making, what elements of gift and character, circumstance, training and
experience were so mixed in him that nature could stand up and say:
"This is a man." This is not the same idle performance as to descant
rapturously upon his purely inborn genius. It is no purpose of mine to
attempt a definition or dissection of genius. It is only in our youth or
ignorance that we possess the confidence to define such abstractions as
beauty, goodness, genius, and art. Still less do I propound a recipe for
its manufacture. If I knew the secret of its attainment I should first
try it upon myself.
Shakespeare was made by the right native genius, by the right
environment, and by the right training. We will take these factors in
that order.
Genius, like every other good gift and every perfect gift, "is from
above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights." We feel its presence
when we are fortunate enough to meet with it. In our hearts we know that
it is some strange and incommunicable faculty for performing with a
divine ease those achievements which are the despair of other men, or to
which they can only make some approach by "infinite pains."
Brains have been classified as brains of one, two and three storeys. As
you cannot, by thinking, add a cubit to your stature, so can you not, by
thinking, add a storey to your brain. You may furnish and brighten the
one storey or the two storeys with which your mental house was built
before your birth. You may open the windows and let in the sun and air.
By the best education and habit you may fill that house with art and
beauty and light and comfort, or, by the worst, you may render it ugly,
foul, bleak and dark; but you can never add a new floor. Shakespeare's
brain was not only built by mother Nature in three storeys, but those
storeys were lofty and roomy in an astonishing degree. They were also
full of windows.
His natural gifts were vast. No writer ever possessed such a
manifoldness, or rather, totality of them. In a different branch of
art, one cannot but think of Michael Angelo, who could carve the Moses,
paint the Sistine ceiling, or build St. Peter's, with equal grasp and
mastery over conceptions each too sublime for ordinary men.
If we analyse and enumerate the endowments lavished by Nature on her
"darling" of the Avon, we shall find, as in the case of Angelo, that he
not only displays each separate gift, but that he displays each in its
highest form and fullest measure. His own modesty may be permitted to
envy this man's art or that man's scope, but never was envy more
misplaced.
This is no rhapsody. Longinus tells us that an unassailable verdict upon
the sublime must be the consensus of different ages, pursuits, tastes
and walks in life. Concerning Shakespeare's gifts there is no discord
among the competent--the Hazlitts, Coleridges, Emersons, Carlyles. Some
of those gifts can be cultivated in considerable measure, some in a
less; some lie beyond all training and all art. But no art or
cultivation whatever can bring any one of them to the Shakespearean
height and fulness, if Nature herself has been less kind than she was
to the child of John Shakespeare, that unsuspecting burgess of Stratford
town.
If, before we attempt to realise the supremacy of Shakespeare in any
particular attribute, we have recognised how miserably we ourselves have
managed, at some time or other, to fail in every one of them; if, before
we approach an appreciation of Shakespeare, we have applied to other
great creators the same analysis which we are about to apply to him; if
we have learned from the most instructive examples what is meant by
creation, by imagination, by insight, by wisdom, by wit, by humour, by
eloquence, and by verbal music; then we cannot fail to acknowledge that
here is the all-round, the all-comprehensive genius, superlatively
dowered with each and all of them; that here is the entire mind, where
others are partial; that here, as I believe some one has put it, is the
man who, when others have said, or depicted, or argued, or pleaded,
seems to come along and say, "let me show you how this should be done,"
and so does it once and for ever.
It is but few, one may believe, who are fully conscious of the reasons
why Shakespeare could fill the Elizabethan pit with the rough London
apprentices and the Elizabethan boxes with superfine gallants and
courtiers; why he has been a delight equally to the worldling, to whom
always "the play's the thing," and to the sedate scholar, who has
perchance never set foot in a theatre, and to whom a play is a dramatic
poem printed in a book. Yet the reason is simple. It is because
Shakespeare's gifts are numerous and varied enough to appeal to populace
and gallant, to worldling and student; they meet to the full each and
every demand that can be made upon a work of dramatic art.
To begin with, he possesses the true constructive power, the first
secret of the playwright's craft. He can visualise an extensive or
complicated passage of human life, with its cross streams of action, its
moving world of persons, its intricate motives and passions--whether it
surround Julius Caesar in ancient Rome or Othello in Cyprus or one of his
kings of English history--whether he find it recorded in Holinshed, or
in Plutarch, or in some novel of Italy--and, with the swift intuition of
the master craftsman, he grasps the essentials, arranges and links them,
and renders them organic and compact. With sure judgment of effect he
adds to his original or subtracts from it, and he rounds off the whole
into an absorbing and unflagging story to be told in action during but
"two hours traffic of the stage." No one can fully realise this immense
selective and constructive power until he has analysed the action of
_Macbeth_, and observed the marvellous skill which has compressed into
those five short acts a whole world of great and little things done and
said and thought.
But greater and rarer still than this architectural gift is the creative
power which lies in imagination. And by imagination I do not mean merely
the play of fancy in Mercutio's famous speech, nor simply the conjuring
up of pictures as in Clarence's dream, nor the invention of those
perfect similitudes which meet us everywhere. In these, it is true,
Shakespeare is consummate. But I mean that deeper and more pervasive
power, which beholds beings of the imagination as if they were flesh and
blood realities, and presents men and women of the past or of nowhere as
if they were breathing in the living present before our eyes; the
shaping power which--to make a quotation that never stales--
gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name--